Friday, December 5, 2014

Sonic Avenues - S/T LP - Green Vinyl (/100)

Dead Broke (2014, Reissue)

I've written about this record twice before on this website, though it was in the early days of doing this when I was pretty much just writing a sentence or two on Flickr. The first time is when the album originally came out on Going Gaga and then again when it was re-released on Taken By Surprise. Why the need to buy it a third time? Two reasons really. The first is that this is one of my favorite records of the last ten years and that makes it worthy of some variant collecting, if you ask me. But a bigger reason than that is that this version on Dead Broke has two new songs on it that were not on either of the other pressings. That makes it an easy buy for me.

The first of the new songs, "Bored With Love" is a little bit slower some of the songs on this album. Though it is certainly not lacking in the hook department at all. The one thing that Sonic Avenues does better than almost every band going these days is the way they layer their vocal melodies in their songs. It's actually amazing to me and this song is as good as anything else in their catalog at showcasing that.

The second is called "Sixteen Years" and it is an almost White Wires kind of old school rock and roll style song. Once again the vocals elevate it to something pretty special, but I just can't get The White Wires out of my head when I'm listening to it; not that you could consider that a bad thing - I love The White Wires too.

I will say that I can sort of see why they may have left these two songs off the original release. The album they released originally was so perfect that you just didn't need these two songs to make it better. It certainly wouldn't have detracted from it, but they just weren't absolutely necessary. That being said these two songs are incredible and it blows my mind that they didn't end up on a 7" or something as they definitely needed to see the light of day. I'm really glad the band finally decided to release them.

The other bonus is that this is the very first time that this Sonic Avenues record has been available in America, so hopefully that gives new people an easier way to pick up this truly incredible record.